Entering the Conversation

A young man walked into a party where a deep and lively conversation was already underway. People are nodding, debating, referencing shared experiences, and laughing at their commonalities. Without stopping to ask what’s being discussed, he boldly jumped into the conversation. He was confident, animated, and full of anecdotes. He spoke for several minutes, passionately sharing his knowledge of the subject.

But instead of the approval or curiosity he expected, there was nothing but an awkward silence. Someone finally responds: “Yeah…we just spent the last fifteen minutes saying exactly that.”

He hadn’t realized it, but he had walked into the middle of a conversation and repeated what everyone already knew. He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t helpful either. He hadn’t added anything new, because he didn’t know what had already been said. He learned the painful lesson that you must listen before you speak.

In scholarly work, that means reading widely, studying what’s already been written, and identifying where your voice can contribute something fresh. A literature review essentially acknowledges what has already been said. The literature review demonstrates that we have listened to our colleagues and we are ready to move the conversation forward with our own thoughtful contribution.

Overview of Key Words and Concepts

A Literature Review is both summary and analysis. A Summary is a concise representation of the thoughts and ideas of another scholar. An Analysis is an organized and thoughtful exploration of the significant observations, insights, and contributions of a scholarly work. A literature review includes both summary and analysis so that your reader can see that you understand the essential premises of a scholarly work and have thoughtfully considered the contribution of that work to the research community.

Most literature reviews for dissertations are built primarily around Peer-Reviewed Journal articles. While other resources like books, recordings, and digital resources can be included in a literature review for a dissertation, most of the research included will be peer-reviewed journal articles. Peer-reviewed journal articles hold significant importance in scholarly research because they are not a vanity publication; that is, they were not published by the authors themselves, or a popular publication that will publish any article that meets its criteria and themes. A peer-reviewed journal article is vetted by other scholars who are also invested in the same academic field of study. These peer reviewers are experts who help to identify worthwhile research by evaluating the methodology and affirming the relevance of the scholarship used to support the work. Peer reviewers are utilized because they understand the significance of the research shared. Moreover, peer reviewers often share feedback that authors are expected to incorporate before their submissions will be published. While each journal has its own means of identifying peer reviewers and its own process for reviewing articles, all peer-reviewed journals adhere to guidelines to carefully consider any research before publication.

The purpose of the literature review is not merely to demonstrate that you know the scholarly context of the field as it informs your research. The purpose of the literature review is also to observe themes. There is more to a Theme than just “all articles are on the same theory,” or “these articles focus on the same student population.” Such commonalities are a result of your research process. A theme teases out deeper meaning across the articles by drawing connections between and among a few of them. For example, perhaps several apply Adler’s Theory of Belonging, while others focus on Tinto’s Transition Theory to understand the retention of first-semester students at four-year, regional, public institutions of higher education. Each of these sets of research articles thus explores a shared theme; one set explores this phenomenon using one theoretical framework while the other explores the same phenomenon using a different theoretical framework. The development of the analysis in your literature review teases out these threads of connection to reveal the themes of the scholarly research.

The benefit of identifying the themes is that the patterns revealed by themes often also reveal gaps. A Gap is the space within the body of research that has not yet been fully explored. In the example above for themes, neither of the threads looked at two-year institutions or returning adult learner populations. These gaps in the research provide a perfect entry point for a dissertation topic. Such a project could and should still rely on the relevant scholarly research that has been completed, but instead of exploring the topic from the same angle, the gap allows you, the researcher, to explore the topic from a new perspective. Thus, completing a literature review often enables us to find the gaps to explore through our dissertation work.

As a doctoral student, it is likely that you have completed academic research several times during your graduate studies. While these opportunities provide a strong foundation for the work you are about to begin, engaging in research for your dissertation requires an intentional approach that gives you the depth and breadth of research you need to thoughtfully enter the conversation about your topic. You should also view the research you do as recursive, that is it is something you will revisit several times throughout your dissertation process, especially if your work on your dissertation spans several years or if your topic explores a relatively new field such as artifical intelligence. This chapter is designed to help you both refine your focus on your research topic and find resources to support your scholarly work.

What Should I Research?

It can seem daunting to start the research process. Even if you know what you want to research, you may feel a little overwhelmed as you begin your dissertation research in earnest. You may wonder what words to use or how to combine ideas to yield the best results. You may wonder how to thoughtfully add to the research you have already collected as part of your studies and coursework.

One strategy that may help you as you begin your research is to complete a brief brainstorming activity. Gather what you need to write your ideas – either the physical pen and paper version or the digital word processing document option – and set a timer for three minutes. Write all the words and ideas you can about a specific topic of interest to you for three minutes without interruption. When the timer goes off, stop writing and read what you wrote. Make notes on what you generated, highlighting key terms or circling similar terms for the same concept. If you feel like your ideas are scattered or too broad, you can repeat the process, focusing on one of the phrases or ideas you generated with your first brainstorm. The ideas you generated through the brainstorming activity can help you when you begin your research, as you will have identified key concepts, similar phrases, and perhaps even a theory or scholar relevant to your topic.

In addition to key terms, you should also consider key scholars in the field, movements in education, and key theories. It is likely that your coursework thus far has exposed you to key scholars, movements, and theories of education. If you are not sure if there are key scholars, movements, or theories of education associated with your topic, pay attention as you read the research you find. For example, any study that focused on the zone of proximal development likely refers to Lev Vygotsky, as he coined the concept. Similarly, the role of learning communities as a path for women’s leadership development would likely include several sources that refer to Lean In or Sheryl Sandberg. If there is a specific theory, movement, or scholar associated with your topic, you will likely see multiple references as you complete your research, and that should indicate to you that you need to seek out more information about that concept, scholar, theory, or movement. It is also a good idea to discuss your general idea with your mentor, as they will likely be able to share specific concepts, scholars, theories, or movements that are relevant to your research interest.

At Saint Peter’s University, you have access to several resources that can help you understand the prevalent concepts, theories, and scholars in the field of education. If your coursework has not yet exposed you to the scholarly foundation of our field, you should spend some time exploring the online Credo Reference. The entries in this digital encyclopedia provide a high-level introduction to key terms and scholars in the fields of education, leadership, psychology, and social science. This resource, then, is something you may use to help refine your research interests and should be cited if it is something you used to help define key terms in your research, but it is not considered a scholarly source for the purposes of your literature review.

Even if you know what you want to research and are eager to engage, you are likely to find that your initial idea is refined as you complete the research process. It is important to keep track of the ideas you are researching and how they evolve over time, as that will help you identify additional resources. Understanding how your research has been refined over time will likely help you craft your literature review as well as the initial and last chapters of your dissertation.

What Research Should I Include?

A dissertation begins with research. While you have likely engaged in academic research during your studies, research for the literature review of a dissertation has a different purpose. When you were required to research topics for your classes, you likely had a specific assignment with specific guidance on the research you were to include. While your dissertation mentor will help guide you, with this project, YOU make the assignment and set the guidance for your selection of scholarly resources. The responsibility can be a bit daunting. To help you, we’ve developed some guiding principles to shape your academic research. You should also consider working closely with a campus librarian even if you feel you have strong research skills, and, of course, engage with your mentor regularly throughout the research process to share what you have found and seek their guidance.

Types of resources

The research included in a dissertation’s literature review typically falls into two broad categories: peer-reviewed articles and everything else.

Most of the scholarship included in your literature review should be from academic, peer-reviewed journals. Access to peer-reviewed journals is often through curated library databases that can only be accessed if you are physically in the library or if you use your campus credentials to log in to the library databases remotely. These databases will be where you spend most of your research time. But you can also use resources like Google Scholar and the Directory of Open Access Journals database to find publicly available peer-reviewed academic scholarship.

Your research may also rely, in small part, on other respected sources. Education issues are often highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education and newspapers like The New York Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer. You may also find recordings of lectures by leaders in the field on YouTube, TED Talks, or interviews as part of a podcast. Finally, institutional webpages may provide insight into the application of a specific practice or theory.

We turn our attention to finding these sources and will focus our attention on peer-reviewed articles through the library, but we will touch briefly on strategies for finding and using the other types of resources shared in this overview.

Academic Research

Most of your research for your literature review should come from academic research. There are many different sources of academic research. As a Saint Peter’s University student, your research should rely on the databases available through the O’Toole Library. You may also find Google Scholar, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the US Department of Education’s Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) valuable collections of academic research.

Library Research

The best place to start to find research articles is through our institutional library. The O’Toole Library maintains an Education Research Guide. The guide has a variety of tabs to explore, including two curated lists of resources—one for Higher Ed and one for K-12—making it an excellent resource for the initial quest for peer-reviewed articles related to your research interest. These curated resources will likely be the primary sources you use to identify scholarship to include in your literature review.

One feature of many library databases that can be especially important for a literature review is to search for sources that cite an article. When you have identified a source that addresses your research interest, you can often search within the database for all the other articles that include that article in their Reference Pages. If the article was of interest to you, chances are sources that cite that article will also be of interest to you. Typically, this option is part of the bibliography entry page, which is the page in the database that tells you more information about the article and links to the digital representation of the article. The reference librarians are an excellent resource to help navigate this feature in our library databases.

While Saint Peter’s University does maintain subscriptions to several robust databases that will serve you well throughout your dissertation, you may also find that there are sources that are not in our physical or digital collections. If your research identifies an article or book that is not in our collection, you can request a copy of the article, a relevant chapter of a book, or an entire book through Interlibrary Loan. It is better to request and review the resource if it is closely aligned with your research than to ignore it if we do not have it in our collection. If you do not review the work before determining whether to include it in your literature review, you risk dismissing an important contribution to the conversation and your scholarship.

Google Scholar

In addition to offering a general search engine, Google provides an academic research search engine called Google Scholar. If you are using Google to complete research for your dissertation, it is wise to use the Google Scholar search engine. Google Scholar has advanced research features that allow you to narrow your results by timeframe, author, and publisher. While many of the articles included in Google Scholar are in the public domain, not all articles are. Google Scholar can then complement the O’Toole Library databases, as it may reveal peer-reviewed articles that are not in our subscription databases.

OAJ Directory

Scholars are increasingly turning to open access journals to publish their research. The opportunity to publish in an open access journal has become more widely accepted because these journals adhere to many of the same principles of academic publishing. In fact, open access journals are often still housed by academic presses, institutions, and organizations devoted to research and scholarship. Many open access journals elect to publish articles digitally as soon as they complete the peer review and editing process and then collect these articles into an issue. The Directory of Open Access Journals maintains an up-to-date listing of open access journals.

ERIC

The United States Department of Education maintains the Education Resources Information Center, ERIC. ERIC is a robust database that curates scholarly research on K-16 education in the United States. The database is freely available and often includes links to full-text reports and articles included in the database. The database includes dissertations and theses completed by graduate students, academic research published in scholarly journals, policy institute research, white papers, and grant-funded research reports. The resource includes a general search field and guidance on using advanced search options. It is wise to familiarize yourself with ERIC and to regularly use this resource for your research interests.

NCES

Have you ever wondered where the data we collect on our students goes? Where do our reports on standardized tests and enrollment live after we submit our reports? The National Center for Education Statistics maintains the data schools, colleges, and universities are required to submit to meet federal regulations. This data is then stored in aggregate and shared publicly. Although the data is often several years behind, NCES data and reports can be especially important for a quantitative study.

Popular Sources

While much of the research you complete for your literature review should be from academic sources, that does not mean you cannot use popular sources. Education and research about education have social and civic importance. The explosion of digital resources in the past twenty years has increased access to educational research and created new venues to share and discuss education topics. The popular resources that may prove valuable for your literature review research include newspapers, TED Ed, YouTube, podcasts, and institutional webpages.

Newspapers

Large city newspapers like the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, and Washington Post often include an Education section. Such sections and their articles may indicate a specific regional concern or highlight a national trend. If you are not sure what you should research, the education section of a newspaper may inspire you.

TED Talks, TEDx, and TED Ed

The collection of videos hosted by TED grows daily. Their original focus on Technology, Education, and Design (thus the acronym) has expanded to incorporate topics by experts in a variety of fields. These brief videos often provide an opportunity to listen to and learn from a recognized scholar. For example, Carol Dweck, a well-respected American psychologist best known for her work on motivation and the Growth Mindset, delivered a TED Talk. Professors and graduate students alike often lead TEDx presentations. TED Ed videos explain complex ideas for a younger audience. The point is that videos hosted by TED or its affiliates can be a possible source for your literature review. It is important, though, that the scholarly credentials of the speaker as well as the content of the presentation are carefully evaluated.

YouTube

The value of contributions on YouTube expanded in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. A wide variety of organizations turned to online conferences and have continued to offer a virtual option for part or all their sessions. For example, Education Evolving, which focuses on district and state policies and classroom practices to support learning, records and shares its annual conference plenary on YouTube. Similarly, the Teaching and Learning Center at University College Dublin has a library of videos on best practices in teaching and learning that include classroom practices, academic advising, and metacognition on YouTube. As you consider the recordings on YouTube, be sure to check the information included about the creator to guide your evaluation of the credentials and content.

Institutional Webpages

Colleges and universities have found the power of the internet. Individual departments on college campuses can also expand their reach through their webpages. While it may not be wise to refer to generic institutional webpages, if there are special reports or initiatives that are exemplary in the field, these sources can definitely be incorporated into your literature review and dissertation. For example, Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership maintains a webpage on the art installation Hostile Terrain 94. This digitized exhibit expands the reach of the art, capturing the lives of those who died trying to enter the United States through the Sonoran Desert.

Podcasts

Podcasts have gained credence as an academic source as organizations and scholars have adopted this platform to explore significant issues in education. The National Association for Student Financial Aid maintains Off The Cuff, a weekly podcast that focuses on financial aid issues. The podcast blends interviews with leaders in higher education with guidance on best practices. Alternately, The Cult of Pedagogy, reflects the teaching experiences of its originator and editor, Jennifer Gonzalez, as it looks at the intersection of scholarship and practice. It is not required that you include a podcast episode in your literature review, but the value of this medium should not be overlooked.

How Do I Keep My Research Organized?

It is extremely important to keep track of the articles you are finding. It can be easy to lose track of the research articles you have found and those you have reviewed and decided not to include in your study. While there are many ways you can organize your research, there are a few tools available to you as a Saint Peter’s University student to help organize your research.

Three tools are available to you through your Saint Peter’s University Google Workspace and therefore can go with you anywhere you complete your research. You have the option of using either a Google Doc or a Google Sheet to keep track of your research. You can set up either to keep track of your research references, but make sure that you include the following elements:

• APA-formatted Reference Entry
• Where you found the source (Library Database, Google Scholar, course resource, etc.)
• Key Terms
• Whether or not you will use the source

You can also elect to use Google Keep. Google Keep functions more like a digital post-it note. Google Keep allows you to code your notes with labels and colors. You can also include hyperlinks. Google Keep might be a good strategy for you if such visual aids would help you keep your ideas clear.

There are also open-source research citation managers that can help you keep track of bibliographic information associated with a specific research topic. Both Zotero and Mendeley provide such services at no cost to you; however, it is important to note that Zotero is something you download and use on your personal computer, while Mendeley is a web-based tool. These services are ready to keep track of your bibliographic information as you complete your research. They also allow you to annotate your saved articles and search within your notes. There are also paid and subscription services that you can purchase on your own or may be available to you through an association with another institution.

The point, though, is to find a strategy to keep your research organized that works for you.

How Do I Find Research Articles?

The key to finding research articles to include in your dissertation is to plan to devote time to researching articles on your topic. You should make a research plan that is separate from your tool for organizing your research. It may be easiest to keep a notebook specifically for your research plan or you may want to create an electronic document or spreadsheet to keep track of your research progress. While you can customize this research plan to meet your needs, it is important, though, that you keep track of three things: the database, the search terms, and the time frame for articles.

• Please use several databases to search for your scholarly articles. Each database presents information from different publishers, so relying on one database only could exclude extremely relevant and significant research.
• Please keep track of your search terms. These terms can help you identify combinations that yielded particular results or, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, where there are gaps in the research because the results are thin.
• Please be mindful of the dates you use to find research. It might serve you well to start with a narrow focus on the last five years and expand to five to ten years to see the trends in the discussion, identify where the research is growing, and make sure you are using the most current research. Some topics do warrant expanding your research to twenty or more years. But it is best to start with the most recent research on the topic first.

This information will help you see what searches you have completed and which ones were the most fruitful.

Using Boolean Search Terms

We have been spoiled by internet search engines that anticipate what we want and fill in our ideas for us to find the best sources. While library database search engines are powerful, they expect that you are going to be more intentional and specific in your searching for sources than you might be with a general search on Google or with the questions you ask Siri. Library database searches, then, can be most fruitful when you combine your research topic with Boolean Operators.

Boolean operators are a powerful way to expand and focus your research by using three simple terms: “and”, “or”.  and “not”. “And” combines terms so that all search results include both terms. And is most useful when you are seeking research that explores the intersection of concepts. Or combines terms so that search results yield all sources that include the first term and all sources that include the second term. “Or” is most useful when there are synonymous or similar terms that can be used to express the same idea. “Not” yields results that have one term and excludes all resources that include the second term. It is most useful when there are phrases or ideas you want to exclude from the research. When you use Boolean operators you typically place the terms you are searching in quotation marks and add the Boolean operator between the terms, e.g. “guidance counselor” and “urban schools”; “two-year college” or “community college” or “junior college”; “art academy” not “high school”.

Let’s consider an example.

Most advanced search options in databases and for Google Scholar allow you to build searches using Boolean operators. The advanced features often also allow you to narrow your search window by date and for peer-reviewed articles. Some advanced search options even allow you to search within the title, abstract, and keywords. Together, Boolean operators and the built-in advanced search options of a database can make your search for sources to include in your literature review quite productive.

Table 1: Boolean and Google Scholar Advanced Search Terms

Database Thesaurus

In addition to allowing you to combine and exclude terms using Boolean search operators, most academic research databases have a built-in thesaurus. This thesaurus is specific to the database, though it may yield new terms for you to consider using across databases. The thesaurus helps you identify additional terms to use to find articles that discuss the same topic. For example, if we were researching retention in the ProQuest Education database, the thesaurus reveals that there is a body of research about student retention and a body of research about teacher retention, each of which has different key words to use in the database to find the relevant articles. The related terms for student retention include “retention in school” and “retention rates.” These terms can be combined with “at risk students”, “college students”, “enrollment management”, “graduation rate”, “school dropouts”, “secondary school students”, and “students.” These valuable search terms were all curated by the database managers to make finding relevant articles on the same topic easier for researchers like you to find.

Each database’s thesaurus is most often found on the advanced search page of the database, but if you cannot find it easily, please contact the O’Toole Library Reference Librarians for assistance. They will be happy to help guide you to the right place.

Interlibrary Loan

No one library can possibly house or have access to all of the possible research on a topic. It is important, then, that you learn how to navigate the interlibrary loan process. As the dissertation process spans several terms, the weeks it may take to receive a book or a photocopied or scanned chapter or article is not an excuse to dismiss a work we do not have in our library collection. You may not be able to include the resource in an early draft of your dissertation, but if you request the resource as you complete your literature review research, you will likely be able to read, evaluate its usefulness, and incorporate the source into your research if warranted long before you are in your research collection stage.

How Do You Know You are Done Researching?

It is our hope that as researchers entering the conversation, you never want to finish researching and reading the scholarship. But we also realize that such a hope is unrealistic. After all, you do need to finish your dissertation.

For the purposes of the Dissertation I course at Saint Peter’s University, your research is complete when you have identified 20 respected academic resources to incorporate into your literature review. These sources, though, are going to provide the foundation for your dissertation work, so make sure you are selecting the best sources, not just the most readily available sources or the first twenty sources that came back in the first database you checked, to complete the assignment.

You should anticipate taking advantage of the time between Dissertation I and Dissertation II, as well as while you are waiting for your first three chapters to move through the IRB process, to check the databases again and make sure that no new, relevant research that relates to your topic has been published. The academic conversation is continually evolving and developing as new studies are released, so you need to stay in touch with the research and will likely add a few more sources to your literature review after Dissertation I is complete.

In our next chapter, we’ll explore how to craft your literature review.

Incorporating AI Responsibly: Finding Sources

AI continues to evolve and we are continuing to learn how to use AI responsibly. It should be noted that at this time AI is rather limited in its reliability and functionality. But, AI can also be a useful tool to help with tasks that can be automated so that we work smarter not harder.

Working Smarter

One way you can use AI to support your research is to ask a tool like Litmaps or Research Rabbit to mine publication information for you. But the power of these tools are dependent on your efforts to identify articles and research first. If you merely ask it to find articles on a topic, it functions like Google Scholar, but it may yield sources that are not available to you through our library subscription or sources you are not entirely sure are from peer-reviewed journals. You would still need to track down the article and read it to determine if it should stay in your culled sources. These AI-generated searches need guidelines for what to cull in its search. Until it has those guidelines, it will pull all articles on a topic. If, however, you engage in the work of finding the initial ten or twenty articles for your literature review, have reviewed those articles carefully, and have a solid working reference list of credible sources, then you can share that list of resources with the tool of your choice to create the guidelines the AI needs to be most useful to you. If you provide such information to the tool of your choice by uploading your working reference list, the tool can then help you find other published articles that are related to the ones on your list. The tool will even alert you as new research on the same topic or new research that references those articles is published.

Working Harder

AI can also be used to summarize or make dense texts more easily consumable by adjusting the reading level. But such summaries and adaptations are not foolproof. In fact, relying on an AI-generated summary or text alteration may actually make writing the literature review more difficult because you are not aware of the nuances of an article’s arguments or lose a key insight that AI deemed extraneous. It is important, then, that you invest the time in reading and understanding the sources that you use for your dissertation.

Conversation Topics for Your Mentor

As you meet with your mentor to discuss your research topic, consider asking the following questions:

• Are there scholarly journals or organizations that they would encourage me to include in my search for resources?
• I am considering focusing on [insert name of theory, movement, concept], are there particular research studies or scholars I should be sure to include?
• Is there significant scholarship that was written more than twenty years ago that I should be sure to include in my research?

Suggested Writing Activities

Sometimes we begin our research with two ideas that may or may not yet be connected, e.g. returning adult learners and the theory of belonging, but it may be hard to see how such big ideas could intersect for your research if you merely used those terms. This brainstorming activity will help you see where the ideas intersect.

Gather together what you need to write your ideas – either the physical pen and paper version or the digital word processing document option – and create two columns (either create a table with two columns in a digital version or fold the paper in half. Label each column with one of the two topics.) Set a timer for two minutes and write all the words and ideas you can about one of the topics in its column without interruption. When the timer goes off, stop, reset the timer and complete the activity again for the other topic. When the second timer goes off, re-read what you wrote, circling or highlighting ideas where you naturally made a connection or where a question was raised in one column and answered in the other.

The ideas you generated through the brainstorming activity can help you when you begin your research as you will have identified the intersection or overlap between the topics you are interested in researching.

Having explored how to locate, evaluate, and manage sources, the next step is learning how to use them in your dissertation. Chapter 2 will guide you from individual sources toward building a coherent literature review, transforming summaries and notes into an organized essay that highlights themes, contradictions, and gaps in the scholarship.

References

Directory of Open Access Journals. (n.d.). Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ.

ERIC. (n.d.). Education Resources Information Center. U.S. Department of Education.

ERIC. (n.d.). Advanced Search – Education Resources Information Center. U.S. Department of Education.

Gonzalez, J. (n.d.). Cult of Pedagogy. Cult of Pedagogy.

National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. (n.d.). Off The Cuff [Audio podcast]. NASFAA.

National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Home. U.S. Department of Education.

O’Toole Library. (n.d.). Education Research Guide. Saint Peter’s University.